Posted on 01/17/2006 5:16:42 AM PST by beaversmom
PASADENA, CALIF. -- Walter Cronkite is some kind of hero. He's old and he doesn't give a damn.
There's no reason why he should. He'll be 90 this year. He moves a little slowly and he's a bit deaf, but his mind is very sharp. He knows exactly who he is: a newsman. In 1981 when he retired as anchor of the CBS Evening News, he was voted, for the umpteenth time, "the most trusted man in America." In 1994, years after he'd stopped delivering the daily news he was still voted "the most trusted man in America."
He's a veteran reporter, he's venerated and he's still got a few things to say. Officially, he still works for CBS and has an office there. Perhaps the news department bosses don't pay much attention to him now, but he'll speak his mind, no matter what.
He's here at the PBS portion of TV Hacks On Tour (TVHOT) because, later this year he will be the subject of an episode of American Masters. In the new batch of American Masters programs, he's in the company of Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe and film director John Ford. Unlike them, Walter Cronkite is alive, and kicking.
After a brief but laudatory introduction, he shuffles slowly to the stage, gives a little wave to acknowledge the applause (even the critics applaud him, which they never do for TV celebrities) and, when he sinks into his chair, he lets out a very audible sigh of relief to be sitting down again. His audience of about 100 critics is small but hangs on every word.
He probably doesn't know it, but his audience is more in awe of him than of the many, many stars and TV executives who appear at TVHOT. At a time in the United States when the country is at war and the state of the news business is endlessly debated, Cronkite is an icon, a touchstone of integrity in news reporting. Maybe he does know it. Cronkite is nobody's old fool.
He's asked many questions, but the big one is related to his famous intervention into the debate about the Vietnam war. Back then, returning from Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, Cronkite addressed his massive audience with a direct, personal perspective. "It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate." Then he urged the government to open negotiations with the North Vietnamese. In the White House, president Lyndon B. Johnson famously said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America."
Today, the actual question comes in this form: "Mr. Cronkite, a few minutes ago you said that you thought the Iraq war had reached the point that the Vietnam war was when you made your statement about that war. If you were anchoring the news today. . ."
Cronkite cuts it off. He knows what he's being asked -- would he editorialize against the Iraq war?
"Yes, I would," he says bluntly, interrupting the questioner.
A hush falls on the room. Cronkite looks around with his weak old eyes and says it again, for emphasis. "Yes, I would."
What would he say? "What I would like to have said was at a moment that's just passed, when we had an opportunity to say to the world and to the Iraqis, after the hurricane disasters that mother nature had not treated us well, and we find ourselves terribly missing in the amount of money it takes to help these poor people out of their homeless situation, and to rebuild some of our important cities. And therefore we are going to have to bring our troops home.
"I don't think it necessary to constantly say that we are, you know, leaving them in the lurch exactly. We're going to leave it, their country, some day. It is my belief we should get out now."
In the context of the U.S. today and its hand-wringing media world, Cronkite's straightforward opinion is quite stunning. The Bush administration is essentially at war with the American media. If it isn't trying to manipulate the press, it is threatening it. With the proliferation of right-wing pundits on all-news cable channels, the American press constantly devours itself in accusations of bias and lack of patriotism.
Walter Cronkite has little time for tedious arguments. He believes in the old-fashioned virtues of fairness and balance in reporting. He thinks news anchors should be reporters and, sometimes, a reporter is entitled to be emotional. "I don't think the anchor person or any other person on the air need to hide their emotions. I think it's a mistake if they play upon their emotions and make more of the story perhaps than it deserves. We've got to be careful of that."
And he doesn't have a problem with a news anchor stepping out of the news-delivery role to editorialize. "Well, I think it's appropriate as long as you clearly point out that 'The previous broadcast was a news broadcast, but after this commercial I'm going to give you a personal opinion about it.' "
Walter Cronkite makes it sound logical, reasonable and clear. Back when he did editorialize about the Vietnam war, not even the blustering fulminations of Lyndon Johnson fazed him. "He used to telephone me when I was on the desk, broadcasting. He watched the Evening News on CBS. But he would jump up and grab the phone after I'd done something he didn't like on the air, and he'd call and insist on talking to me. I was on the air. He could see me right there. And the poor secretary who picked up the phone when we were on the air, would say, 'Well, he's on the air, Mr. President.' And he'd say, 'Goddamn it, I know he's on the air. Get him on here, on the phone.'
"She'd have to put up with this shouting until I was actually off the air. And then he'd get through to me and demand some kind of retraction. He felt he could control these things. He quite obviously didn't with any news organization that I know of."
Throughout this story, Cronkite has been laughing, thoroughly enjoying himself. He enjoyed annoying a president. He didn't give a damn then, and he doesn't now.
No wonder he's some kind of hero.
He's a liberal's fool!
This jerk has SCAMMED everyone, by his BIASED Reporting, all these years.
I always trusted him. To be a horse's ass.
The author is right, no one wants this fool
Traitor then traitor now. WHere's the barf alert?
overdue for his dirtnap ping.
I thought about it, but figured the title to be nauseating enough.
as the years have gone by, he has been exposed as a liberal propagandist and not a fair and balanced journalist. only pbs would still call him an "icon".
Not mention, dumb!
A "There's no fool like an old fool" BUMP.
There's no fool like an old fool.
TV ... *HACKS* on tour? Not even embarrassed by their own honesty.
Somehow he came across better through tubes than through solid state. Yeah that's the ticket.
We know now.
I rank him slightly lower than Jane Fonda on the totem of shame.
At 90 he is proving to be nothing but a FOOL.
As Churchill said, "If a man is not a liberal by the time he is in his twenties, then he has not heart, and if he is not a conservative by the time he is 50, then he has no brain."
At 90 WC sucks as much, or more, than he ever did...
An "American Master"?
His "feat"? He's lived a long time.
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